


It came from the woods (as most strange things do)

by Pavuvu



Category: Original Work
Genre: A boy and his dog, American Gothic - Freeform, Childhood, Coming of Age, Dark, Fairies, Gen, Magic, Supernatural - Freeform, woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 11:52:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3977053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pavuvu/pseuds/Pavuvu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The woods are lonely, dark, and deep, some long ago soul scratched into the flat river rock that separated the land of his parents from the encroaching trees that moved farther in towards the old house with yearly perseverance. As a child he would lie on the narrow path and reform those words on the rock with a small sharp edged pebble. Etching them in deep, ensuring they lasted. Long before knowing the alphabet he knew those seven words, could spell them perfectly without knowing their meaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It came from the woods (as most strange things do)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Creative Writing course taken the fall semester of my Senior year. Story 1.

The woods are lonely, dark, and deep, some long ago soul scratched into the flat river rock that separated the land of his parents from the encroaching trees that moved farther in towards the old house with yearly perseverance. As a child he would lie on the narrow path and reform those words on the rock with a small sharp edged pebble. Etching them in deep, ensuring they lasted. Long before knowing the alphabet he knew those seven words, could spell them perfectly without knowing their meaning.

One early morning just before he turned eight, his father and his brother crossed over those carved words and only one of them came back.

Jason could remember the way his father’s sleeves were murky brown and how his boots left clumps of wet dirt with each step he took into the house. Clumps that broke apart and oozed red and dark soil.

“You promise to be a good boy, don’t you Jason?”

The father ran his hands over his youngest child’s hair and went up the creaky old stairs, dropping clothing and dirt as he went, so that by the time he reached the bathroom at the top of the stairs, he was left standing in his underwear and the knowledge of where in those dark woods he left his oldest son.

The sound of the shower broke the spell set by those red hands and Jason stumbled from the house, letting the aged screen door squeak closed as he and his dog, Mayflower lurched down the narrow path to the stone. The dog darted through the high grass, a mutt in the way of the first dogs. More wild thing than known breed, and Jason stood toes just brushing the edge of the rock, and stared into those hollow trees. Down that forbidden path, his mother ordered him and Grant to avoid. The one that would take them down into the forest with its bears, and grumpkins, and faire folk, and if one continued long enough, to the hole in the woods that never ended. Just sunk down and down, for as long as the earth itself would spin.

It was down that path, Jason knew, he would find signs of his brother. But it was not his place to follow, the stone a better warning than the rules imposed by mother. The woods they are dark, and they are deep.

Mother came before the sirens, dropping groceries that would splatter on the warn wood floor. She screamed and yelled, and Jason could hear the shatter of ceramic, but he and Mayflower stood immobile on their rock, and watched the woods.

The sirens came and took father, left his mother to clean the shattered crockery, and the police brushed past Jason to scour the woods. They came with bloodhounds that made May, snarl and growl and look ten times more the wolf than she was.

It took five days for the detectives to give up the search for Grant. His father would tell them nothing of his crime, just sat in his cell, and watched the cracks in the walls. Jason told the detectives about the hole deep in the woods that had no end, where he was sure his father had left his brothers body. Either they could not find it, or passed his knowledge off as childish imaginings because the detectives never spoke of it again.

His father went to jail and died in jail without ever speaking a word. For two years the woods held his father’s secret close and the case fell cold. In that time Jason grew taller, blonder, and (lonelier). A decade of life under his feet gave him independence he lacked those two years prior but he still heeded his mother’s words when he stood on the cusp of the forest and knew that if he went into those pine boughs he would be able to succeed where the police had failed, and find his brother.

But it was his mother that kept him from doing just that.  He had witnessed the two year spiral that sent her clatter shakily downward, starting with hard eyed mutterings the mornings after she disappeared into the attic and spent hours pulling tomes from the old hawthorn chest his grandmother placed  up there fifty years prior. The woman had carefully outlined the thing in chalk and candle wax, and had forbidden the next two generations of her ken to approach it.

It was two months after his brother’s death that he noticed the attic ladder pulled down in the narrow hallway one early weekend morning, the creak of old board as his mother moved above him.  The first time he spied on her, it was curiosity that fueled his climb up that rickety ladder, Mayflower trying to make her way after him, but succeeding only in brushing her cold nose against the arch of his foot. Jason paused at the lip of the attic entrance, eyes barely over the crown as he scouted for his mother. He found her, hunched over a large book, battery powered camp lantern at her side, spitting forth cold yellow light that illuminated little but the words of the text, and the carving on the box.

The wood beneath his feet groaned and his mother’s head snapped up, her rust colored hair bursting and dragging over her eyelashes like water over bark.  “What are you doing here?”

Her voice was strange, cold and rough in a way he had never heard before.

“I- I was just looking. I saw the ladder and…”

“Just get down before you hurt yourself. If I’ve told you and Grant not to climb ladders I’ve told you a thousand times.”

Jason sunk bellow her sight, and away from her anger, and wrapped his fingers in Mayflowers brown black ruff.

Time past slowly, and his mother grew worse, her attitude turned harsh and unforgiving. She would spend hours up on the attic muttering to herself, and when she did come down it would be for a cup of coffee and a handful of cereal.

Once or twice when she caught Jason in the kitchen at the same time her eyes would form slits and she would take the shaker of salt, or a teaspoon filled with sugar and dump it on the floor before her, then call him over, eyes narrowed and demanding as if she were testing him on some unknown quality.

Summer was on its last legs that second year when Mother came to her conclusion. It was nighttime and a few of the hardier lightning bugs were blinking signals across the field. Jason sat on the gently slanting roof outside his bedroom window, Mayflower’s nails scraped against the wooden shingles and she snapped at crickets that made their home in the shakes.

For a moment all was quiet in the way that things are just before it all comes crashing down.

Then a scream rent the cooling air.

Jason burst to his feet, following Mayflower through the open window; he crashed over his deck, knocking pencils and paper to the floor. May charged past him, barking her deep dark as she flew down the stairs.

“Mom!” he called, voice a throb in his throat. “Are you alright!?”

He raced into the kitchen bare feet scoured by the white grit of sugar and sharp edged glass.

The russet haired woman stood behind the kitchen counter, arms spread wide palms flat on the knife marked pine. 

“I figured it out finally. It took so long.” She lifted her face to him, eyes shining with tears.  “Your father told me he would fix everything. But he lied didn’t he? He didn’t fix anything, he just disappeared with my babies, and they left me _you_.”

She backed away and her hands slid from the counter leaving a trail of red. “I tested you and tested you, but you can’t hide any more, Changeling, I know what you are.”

“You’re not well mom,” Jason tried, one hand up pleadingly the other wrapped in Mayflowers ruff, holding her by his side even as she growled low in her chest.  “Please sit down, I’ll get the band aids and we’ll fix the cut on your hand, okay?”  

For a moment, her face was still and bloodless, but finally her features softened and tears balanced on her lashes. “Okay. Okay that sounds alright.”

He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her out of the kitchen into the family room with its large old stone fireplace and leather couches that hadn’t been a whole cow in over seventy years. When she was seated he gathered the Neosporin and band aids and fixed it over the shallow inch long cut in her palm where the skin split after she shattered the glass sugar jar. Then when she seated and no longer bleeding, Jason vanished back up the stairs, and crawled out the window, and sat on the wood shakes with the crickets and the fireflies and waited for the moon to move low in the sky and for this mother to fall asleep.

He crept up the wooden ladder into the attic and turned on the old camp lamp before brushing his hands over the worked wood of that hawthorn chest. He opened the lid, and pulled out the large leather bound book. Its spine cracked and pulling from the binding and the pages were thick, and yellow.  The words on the pages were strangely shaped, blocky, thick, and spiky. Every ten pages was a picture done in woodblock. The images like solid things, thick with black ink, and white paper.

His little fingers traveled over thousands of words before they rested upon one.  Changeling.

_The offspring of a farie secretly left in the place of a human child._

It took him a long time to decipher that first sentence and when he had gathered the meaning of it he found he could read no more. He slid the book back into the chest, and turned off the lamp. Semi darkness crept around him, the sun breaking to the east after the moons nightly reign.

He left the box and crossed the chalk and wax on the floor until he came to the pile of camping gear. It took some time to dig through the bags and find the old nylon rope that stretched over a two hundred feet, he looped it carefully across his chest, placed a broad yet short folding knife in his pocket and took up the  lantern.

He went down the ladder, down the stairs, and down the deer path to that old river stone, where he found Mayflower waiting for him, her eyes gleaming golden in the early morning light. She sat just beyond the stone, not even three yards into the wood. Her front was towards him, and her head tilted to the side, as if to say, ‘well aren’t you coming?’

There was a moment of hesitation, but then Jason stepped directly on the facet of those letters that had acting as a warning for so long and passed below the branches of the pine.

The woods are cold. They are Silent.  They are Dark. The deer path seems to travel forever, past broken stone outcroppings, and growling streams, and a group of trees with leaves that looked like children’s hands.   

Mayflower led them past shallow valleys, and pockets of wolfs bane and fairy rings, until they came upon that hole in the woods that went down and down.

May flower peered over the edge and sniffed at the emptiness, as Jason unwrapped the length of rope from his torso and found a thick tree near enough to the hole. He passed the rope around its trunk three times before tying a knot strong enough to hold. Then he passed the other end of rope though his belt loops and threaded the lantern on too before tying it off. He gave the rope yank to check the knots strength then gathered up the slack and approached the hole.

For the first time in this whole adventure he felt a moment of apprehension. The niggling fear of what if the rope didn’t hold, of what if there was some monster down in those dark depths, or worse, if there wasn’t anything at all?

He took a deep breath, brushed his hands through Mayflowers fur one last time, and then descended into the darkness.

It wasn’t a fast process, Jason’s careful drop into that oddly round hole. The side walls were slick clay, tree roots barely breaking the surface, rocks felt rounded and smooth when his feet and hands came into contact with them. The light of his electric lantern did little to illuminate the path below him.

Until finally and quite suddenly it ended.

At the bottom of the tunnel grew a single flower, its leaves were thin as tissue and its petals bell shaped, the leaves were the palest white and unmarked by dirt of blemish. It grew out of the neck of the moss green sweatshirt Grant had favored. The same sweater he had been wearing the last day Jason saw him.

Jason gathered the sweatshirt and wrapped its arms around his shoulders, knotting the sleeves around his neck. Then he pulled the flower from the earth and stuck it, roots and all, into the knot of sweatshirt.

Slowly he struggled to pull himself up the shaft, the rope biting into his hands, and his feet slipping down the slick clay walls. After sometime, he could hear Mayflower pacing above, and the light of the sun began to permeate the depth of the hole, until the time came where the pulled himself over the rim, and laid on the mossy ground, and did nothing for a while but breathe.

He awoke to May’s warm tongue brushing his cheek, and the sun high above.  He used the knife to cut the rope from his waist, and to loosen the knot around the tree, where the nylon had cut into the bark. He pulled off Grants sweatshirt and carefully folded the flower into the body of the shirt then tied the arms around it. He then looped the remaining rope over his neck, and followed Mayflower home.

Mother was sitting at the kitchen table when he walked back into the house, late that afternoon. She had a mug of coffee before her, gone long cold, and turned when she heard the sound of him the hallway.

“I’m sorry baby; I didn’t mean what I said last night.” She pleaded rising to her feet to pull at his shoulder and clutch him to her.  She didn’t seem to notice the sweater in his arms or the dark dirt rimming his fingernails.

“I told them.” Jason said, his smile sharp and eyes bright.  “I told them two years ago that if they wanted to find him they had to go deep in those woods. “

He pulled away from his mother, and placed the bundle on the table. The pulled at the sleeves until the flower lay bare and pale before them.  “I told them where to find Grant. Didn’t I?”

 

 


End file.
